Barney Frank retiring from Congress

Multiple news sites are reporting that Barney Frank will announce today that he is not running for re-election. This comes as no surprise, because Massachusetts is losing one Congressional seat, and redistricting is adding conservative voters in New Bedford and other working class towns to Frank’s chi-chi Back Bay/Brookline true blue affluent constituency. Long the beneficiary of district boundaries drawn to favor a left winger, the ungracefully aging Frank has decided that the possibility of losing is so unpleasant that he would rather give up the fight.

Frank whose boyfriend was a senior executive at Fannie Mae when the morthgage bubble was created, served on the Finance committee, responsible for oversight of his boyfriend’s employer. He also bears joint responsibility for the disastrous Dodd-Frank Financial “reform” bill that left Fannie and Freddie untouched.

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Frank used to be somewhat amusing in his younger days, when he was ready with a quip, sometimes even directed at fellow Democrats, as when he greeted the election of Michael Dukakis as governor of the Commonwealth with the memorable sentence: “Superman has been elected governor; unfortunately, the legislature (Democrat-dominated – TL) is made of Kryptonite.”

But in recent years, Frank has turned bitter. Perhaps it was the experience of having a different boyfriend running a gay prostitution ring out fo the apartemnet he shared. Or perhaps it was seeing that his financial “reforms” have brought ruin. Or perhaps he is just a bitter old man, disappointed in love, fat, and subject to the sort of ridicule he used to dish out.

It would not surprise me if MSNBC offers him a commentator job. He has quite a few IQ points on the rest of the on-air talent there.